A suspect non-policy policy by DHS

Express-News Editorial Board

Published
4:18 pm CDT, Thursday, April 26, 2018

Photo: Eric Gay /AP

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Detained immigrant children line up in 2014 in the cafeteria at the Karnes County Residential Center, a temporary home for immigrant women and children detained at the border, in Karnes City, Texas. A New York Times report says some children are being separated from the adults who brought them to this country. less

Detained immigrant children line up in 2014 in the cafeteria at the Karnes County Residential Center, a temporary home for immigrant women and children detained at the border, in Karnes City, Texas. A New York ... more

Photo: Eric Gay /AP

A suspect non-policy policy by DHS

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It is a suspicious chronology.

Last year, federal officials, under pressure from President Donald Trump to get tougher on immigration, proposed separating children from parents who are trying to enter the United States without documents. This was intended as deterrence.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that policy is not in place.

On Sunday, the New York Times — after being denied DHS records that would test that claim — published an article that reports that since October, more than 700 children were removed from adults who said they were their parents. More than 100 were under the age of 4.

The Times back-doored the investigation, getting documents from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Department of Health and Human Services agency tasked with caring for children separated from the undocumented adults claiming to be the children’s parents.

DHS says it does not separate these children from these adults as a matter of deterrence. Instead, it’s done for the protection of the children and if there is some doubt about whether the adults are actually the parents. It is clear that some adults do bring their real children because they’ve heard this will speed their release — and that of their children — from detention more quickly. And there have actually been cases in which adults are bringing in children not their own.

But how does DHS arrive at these decisions to separate? The Times article says that “there is no firm process to determine whether they have been separated from someone who was legitimately their parent, or for reunited parents and children who have been mistakenly separated,” quoting an unnamed Border Patrol official who was not authorized to discuss the agency’s policies publicly.

A few questions arise. If there is no deterrence policy in place, why the DHS reticence to release its records? And since there is “no firm process” to determine the parentage of the children, how are these separation decisions being made?

Just gut reactions? Because the children don’t “look” like the adult?

These would be flimsy reasons to separate a child from a real parent, particularly since people arriving from, say, Central American countries without records cannot prove or disprove the claim. Generally, the families are fleeing violence.

A couple of possible solutions present themselves:

1. Give asylum claims the weight they deserve.

2. If the agency is going to separate children from the adults they arrive with, it should do so with clear policy guidelines.

But, at present, this nonpolicy policy has all the earmarks of being done in furtherance of the administration’s stated wish to deter incoming immigrants by taking away their children. Once said by the big bosses, these types of things can’t be unsaid — and, perhaps, unacted upon.